As part of a two-day visit to Bates, food activist and author Mark Winne '72 gives a talk titled "Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?" at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. (more...)

As part of an environmental studies requirement, Molly Mylius '11 will help create an herb garden next to Commons.

The buzzwords fly around the room and no one stops to explain them. "Commodity crops." "Food web." "Food miles." "Victory garden." "Food aid." "Monsanto." "Food security." No one questions what they mean.

Fifteen Bates students, sprawled on the comfortable couches in Frye Street Union, have gotten together to talk about their food-related academic work. It's "Students Talkin' About Food" — a March 25 event that's part of Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food, the yearlong campuswide look at issues around food. [More...]

Molly Mylius '11 has spent Short Term 2009 helping build a Bates herb garden.

For the first time since the mid-1990s, Bates' lush summer plantings will include a garden dedicated solely to providing food for Dining Services.

A raised bed on the lawn between Commons and Central Avenue will supply herbs to season Dining Services' offerings. The project is the result of a Short Term collaboration between Bill Bergevin, the college's longtime landscape coordinator, and Molly Mylius '11, who helped Bergevin build the herb garden as part of her environmental studies internship. (more...)

The French cheese called Langres was served during "Food, Culture, and Performance," a 2008 Short Term unit taught by Myron Beasley.

You eat where you are: In her course "Back East, Down South, Out West: Regions in American Culture," history professor Margaret Creighton looks at eating habits as part of a greater examination of regional identity. In the East, deep South and West, the course explores the intersection of demographic and economic history with cultural invention. (more...)

While Sylvan Ellefson ’09 hasn’t banished sweets or Commons crispitos from his diet, he has honed an understanding of what his body needs to perform at peak level.

"I was definitely not conscious of eating a balanced diet my first year here," says Ellefson, a Nordic skier from Vail, Colo., who won All-America honors at last year's NCAA Skiing Championships. "But in the past two years I’ve really realized what it means."

With the Bobcats hosting the 2009 NCAA Championships, March 11–14, and with Bates in the midst of its yearlong focus on food, Ellefson and his teammates have ample reason to make Bates Dining Services an honorary member of their team.

"Commons does a great job of providing us with the food we need for how we train," Ellefson says. (more...)

"I can see the world through food," said Kirsten Walter '00, perhaps speaking for all the participants in a wide-ranging Bates discussion of food-related topics on March 16. "I can see all these different issues," she said, "and how to approach them and how to engage people with them."

Walter, director of the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center, was one of four Maine-based Bates alumni, each an expert in food issues, who took part in a panel discussion sponsored by the College's Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food initiative. (more...)

Jim Amaral

Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral and food activist-author Mark Winne are among Bates College alumni featured during March events relating to the Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food initiative. (more...)

Mark Winne '72

If you think of the yearlong Bates Contemplates Food initiative as an arch built from many stones, Mark Winne '72 set the moral keystone in place with a lecture on March 30.

In contrast to burgeoning consumer demand for natural and local foods, he said, low-income Americans have less access than ever to healthy foods. Affluent folks shop for pricey organics at Whole Foods while malnourishment, obesity and related illnesses proliferate in disadvantaged communities whose residents lack access to even reasonably wholesome foods. This is the "food gap" that Winne has fought to bridge for the past 40 years-- a disparity between the haves and the have-nots, he said, that "doesn't just divide the nation, but somehow defines it." (more...)

Per Pinstrup-Andersen. Cornell University

Cornell University professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen offers a lecture about the impacts of globalization on poverty, food security and nutrition at 8 p.m. Monday, March 2, in Pettengill Hall's Keck Classroom (G52), Alumni Walk. Sponsored by the economics department, the talk is open to the public free of charge. (more...)